Where instructors and editors talk writing.

By Paul Lai, Dissertation EditorCongratulations! You’ve just received the
Chief Academic Officer’s approval of your capstone study abstract. There are
just a few steps to complete before you receive your doctoral degree. One major
stumbling block for many students is submission of the study to ProQuest/UMI.
This blog post offers some advice on how to avoid delays at this stage. Keep
these tips in mind when you are drafting your capstone proposal, when you work
on each chapter or section of your final study, and when you revise the
manuscript to submit it for the form and style review.

After final abstract approval (which will not contain the seal on the left, sadly), you will receive
an email from the Center for
Research Quality (CRQ) about the remaining steps of the capstone process
and doctoral degree. In this email, CRQ will direct you to the submission
website where you will enter information about your study and then upload a Portable
Document Format (PDF) file of your capstone study. (Note that the latest
versions of Microsoft Word offer the built-in function: Save As a PDF file.)

Within a couple of business days of
submitting your PDF, you will receive an email from CRQ via the ProQuest
website, either approving your submission or pointing out required revisions before
your study can be approved. If you do not receive an email, look in your spam
folder and log in to the submission website to check your status. Do not assume
that you are done until you have received an email from ProQuest that your PDF
has been approved and that the graduation process has been triggered.

Here are six common reasons for
rejecting a PDF:

Blank pages

Table of contents errors (usually when
the automated table values are missing: Error!
Bookmark not defined.)

Many of these problems are due to the
conversion from Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) to PDF, particularly if you have
formatted your document manually (for line spacing, page breaks, hanging indents, and other
elements) rather than with Word’s automated features. Once you have converted
the document, be sure to scroll through the entire PDF to make sure there are
no errors. Using the capstone templates (PhD, EdD, DBA, DNP) and style tags
will help reduce these types of errors.

Once you get that final confirmation,
your capstone study will be sent to ProQuest, and you will soon be a published
researcher!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Lai, who joined the Writing Center in 2011, has a background is in teaching college English and editing scholarly journals and literary magazines. His dog's name is Giles.

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This
week we present the first in a new blog post series that will spotlight Walden faculty
who have made a difference in the writing development of their students. Look
for a corresponding student spotlight series as well!

Indiana native Dr. K. Elizabeth McDonaldnow lives in Minneapolis, MN.

For
this first faculty spotlight, we identified a Walden instructor who has been
doing extensive work to help her students learn APA style in a logical,
efficient way. Dr.
K. Elizabeth McDonald, core faculty in the MS in Mental Health Counseling
program, has even published on this topic, and the Writing Center is lucky to
have her work featured on our website! We presented
Dr. McDonald with some questions about her
perspective as a Walden instructor.

What
are the most common writing challenges for your students?

I
work with a lot of students in their first course in our master’s program, so
the APA manual itself is a big challenge! Once they make meaning out of the
manual, then the difficulty with logistics seem to disappear. For
example, once students realize that paraphrasing is a clinical counseling skill
as well as a written skill, they cease being over-reliant on quotes in
assignments. Just imagine a counselor parroting back to the client everything
that the client said!

What
have you done to help your students master those skills?

In
addition to providing specific APA page numbers and links to the Writing
Center, I help students make those connections between clinical and written
skills in my feedback to them. For example, I’ll mention that when I am working
with a client who constantly talks in the second person, I have the client
switch the language into first person. If the client says “sometimes you just
don’t know what your husband thinks of you,” I will ask the client to rephrase to
“I don’t know what my husband thinks of me,” which is so much more powerful for
the client. I don’t think it is a coincidence that second person is not recommended
by APA!

How
does your own experience as a writer inform your work with student writers?

I
have received my fair share of red marks on papers (both for school and for
publication) due to formatting issues. Sometimes it feels like my very soul is
in my writing; this can make it difficult to receive feedback about formatting
or content. I try to balance providing feedback with the recognition that
sometimes my feedback may seem trite. When talking about where a period goes in
reference to a citation at the end of the sentence, I let the student know I
realize I am commenting on the placement of a single dot!

What
advice do you have for faculty who want to help their student writers?

Most
importantly, help students find meaning by relating it back to the profession.
Work with others in your program and the Writing Center to develop helpful
resources and make connections between writing skills and professional skills.

Guess
what? You are on stage! Students see unprofessional writing
everywhere they look. As instructors, we have the unique opportunity to be an
example (no pressure here, huh?). I wrote a short article about this very
question, which included an example document written about APA format in APA
style (why the APA does not do this I will never know). The APA
document about APA
is sort of a Cliff’s Notes, and is available in the Writing Center. Boy, I
sound like a lot of fun at a dinner party, huh?

What
advice do you have for students who want to improve their writing?

Review
feedback from your instructor on previous assignments before starting
your next assignment. Oh, and be sure to contact your instructor if you do not
understand the feedback! [Editor's note: In Blackboard, click on Tools → My
Grades → Score to access comments.]

Begin
assignments with a template. I find that downloading a template
from the Writing Center and using it for the beginning of each assignment
makes for a less time-consuming writing process. Your time is precious; stop
spending it looking up how to make the running head for every single
assignment!

Before
beginning to write, add headings from the assignment directions. This will help
you focus your writing and enable you and your faculty member to quickly see
that you have addressed all required elements.

Throughout
your learning process, look for connections between your professional voice and
your profession. Learning because you “have to” is elementary (and boring).
Take control of your education, look at things with an intrigued eye, and use
your critical thinking skills to find connections between your writing style
and your profession.

Counselors need writing skills forcase notes and client advocacy.

How
is a student’s ability to write related to success in your field?

Written
voice is incredibly important in counseling; credibility and advocacy are at
stake! Counselors write case notes at the end of every session, and in the
event that those notes are subpoenaed and provided to the court, they are
subject to intense scrutiny. Counselors need to provide clear and concise
written rationales regarding the interventions used; otherwise, the counselor
(and the profession) loses credibility. Even if the notes never end up in
the courtroom, clinical case notes are sometimes all that exist to provide
evidence of the course of treatment. Counselors also advocate for clients in
written form, such as to a third-party payer, a grant funder, or an
organization to advocate for services. Weak writing skills will significantly
limit the ways counselors can advocate for clients.

What’s
something about you that would surprise your students?

I have entered a single entry into a journal
once a year every year since I was in 5th grade. I also have a
“reasonably adventurous” side. I have zip-lined in Costa Rica, spent a few
weeks in a yurt in Tanzania, walked a questionable and long tension bridge in
Brazil, eaten fried bee larvae in Taiwan, and flown in a hot air balloon at
sunrise over the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

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There are many reasons to take the process of revision seriously. Not
only is revision important because the final product will be much better than
the original draft, it is also a way for a writer to think through and clarify
ideas. A writer’s understanding of his or her topic is often deeper and more
refined after there has been effort to rethink and rewrite troublesome
sections.

That’s fine, right? There isn’t
anything really wrong with it—subject-verb
agreement, not a lot of passive voice, no glaring mechanical errors—but it’s
still just a bit…static. The ideas are all there, but I want this passage to be
more active, more dynamic. How am I supposed to liven up this wording?

As you become a more
sophisticated writer and develop your scholarly voice, revising means improving
your style, not just removing problems and errors. Experienced writers develop
an active, engaging style in part by paying attention to how often they use forms
of the verb to be. These forms
include am, is, are, was, were,
be, being, and been.

This doesn’t mean we’re supposed
to crack open a thesaurus and replace every is
with a fancy, three-syllable verb; even when writing at an advanced level, our
words should flow naturally and in our own voice. However, we should
strive to use to be in moderation.

The verb to be indicates that a thing exists, but not what that thing does
or how it relates to anything else in the sentence; using to be too often in your writing is a bit like having a conversation
with a friend in which you point at a lot of different things but never explain
how those things relate to one another: “This is a leash, there is my dog, and
that is the park down the street.” OK . .
., your friend thinks, but so what? All
those statements may be true and grammatically correct, but see how much
clearer and more active the sentence becomes when we replace all those to bes: “Let’s put a leash on my dog and
walk to the park down the street.”

Along with indicating existence,
the verb to be also acts as a linking verb in a sentence (kind of like
an equals sign): The apple is red,
they were loud, she had been up early, he could be easily convinced. All these
sentences are grammatically correct, too, but there still isn’t a lot of action
going on. Rather than showing action, linking verbs connect the subject of a sentence
to more information or further description about that subject. In this example,
the apple isn’t doing anything—it’s
just being red.

To get an idea of how you use
these verbs in your own writing, take a look at something you’ve written and
circle the number of times a form of to
be appears on a single page. (The first time I tried this on one of my own
drafts, I was in for a rude awakening—to
be verbs appeared on almost every line!) If you go through the above
passage again, you’ll notice that forms of to
be (are, is, will be, has been) occur no less than six
timesin only three sentences. If I
want to perk up this passage, I should try to replace at least some of those
with action verbs instead.

An action verb is just that—a verb that expresses a specific action.
These verbs invigorate your writing and add life to your sentences by making
the subjects actually do things. Action
verbs also vary much more than linking verbs, so expressing ideas through action
verbs allows you to present your thoughts with greater specificity and
precision.

If I wanted to rework my original
passage to include more action verbs and fewer to be verbs, it would look something like this:

Writers should take the revision process seriously for many reasons. Revision
not only ensures the final product improves on the original draft, it also allows
a writer the opportunity to think through and clarify ideas. A writer’s
understanding of his or her topic often deepens and grows more refined after he
or she has rethought and rewritten troublesome sections.

This version includes more active
sentences and conveys the same ideas in fewer words. (You will find that
replacing a few to be verbs will
streamline your writing and clear away some of the clutter in longer
sentences.) The changes also don’t interrupt the natural flow of language by
inserting overly complicated phrases or unfamiliar vocabulary. An easy fix,
right?

As you read over your own work,
keep an eye out for how often you use the verb to be in your sentences. Once you get in the habit of using more
precise verbs and writing more active sentences, you’ll find you begin to sound
more like the developing scholar that you are.

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Whether you’re a yogi or not, you’ve probably heard people
talk about “practicing” yoga. Until I started my own practice, I didn’t really
understand why. Now, though, I realize that using the verb practice is an apt choice for describing not only yoga, but many other
pursuits in life, including writing.

In yoga, we talk about our practice because the goal isn’t
to do a perfect sun salutation. Instead, a yoga practice focuses on a continuously changing and evolving
experience. To me, this means a lot of reflection as I continue to improve
my poses and breathing.

What does this have to do with writing? Writing (and
learning in general) is similar. We don’t just do writing. We practice it:
We are always reflecting on our writing
so that we can grow, change, evolve, and improve. Writing isn’t a static
act that we can master. Ask any published author—She’ll probably tell you that
her writing isn’t perfect yet either.

And that’s the point! The wonderful and frustrating thing
about writing is that it is never complete. We can always continue to improve
and change our writing, striving to further our practice.

The evolving nature of writing is something we often forget.
In a rush to finish a paper or assignment, we can lose sight of our development
as writers, focusing too much on getting a draft “perfect.” So, in the spirit
of always reflecting on our writing, viewing it as a practice not a product,
think about what you can do to reflect and grow your writing.

Solicit feedback. Whether you’re making an appointment with the
Writing Center or requesting the help of a classmate or friend, ask others to
review your work. Hearing their feedback will help you reflect on your writing,
seeing it from a new perspective.

Visit online discussions. Just by visiting this blog you’re
engaging with your writing process. You’re reading others’ experiences with writing
and what it means to them, which gives you the opportunity to think about your
own writing process.

Join a community. The Writing Center has Facebook and Twitter accounts where we pose
questions and share resources about writing. Or see if your classmates at
Walden want to start a writing or study group or participate in an organization
related to your field. These are great ways to think more about your ideas—and
how you present those ideas in writing. If you're working on your proposal or are in the final stages of your capstone process, check out the Walden Capstone Writing Community.

Take courses or seminars. See if you’d be able to take a writing course
through Walden or in your community (many community colleges offer writing
courses). Or attend one of the Writing Center’s live webinars. You can always
improve your writing, and attending or watching even an hour-long webinar can help you think
about your writing in a new way.

As you can tell, there are numerous ways you can continue to
practice your writing. If none of
these seem interesting to you, make up your own. Write in a journal, read a
book about writing, or even just talk with someone else. Small acts of
reflection like this can really help improve your writing.

What other ways do you plan to practice?

In her work in the Writing Center, Beth Oyler is “constantly fascinated by the research Walden's students are completing and where their interests are.” She learns from each paper she reviews.